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I recently had an extremely painful experience migrating data from one software to another. Annoyingly the data in the original software seemed to be a bit confused with the data being stored as latin1 and displayed as UTF8. When I migrated the data it obviously converted ‘as is’ and hence displayed wrong in the second software. After a number of hours researching I stumbled across a clever post that seemed promising:
From what you describe, it seems you have UTF-8 data that was originally stored as Latin-1 and then not converted correctly to UTF-8. The data is recoverable; you’ll need a MySQL function like
convert(cast(convert(name using latin1) as binary) using utf8)
It’s possible that you may need to omit the inner conversion, depending on how the data was altered during the encoding conversion.
I hope this helps anyone else who has a similar issue.